March 29, 2015

Over ten percent of all the traffic that has ever gone through this blog went through in the past week in response to my previous post about Chaos Theory.

Needless to say, that was totally unexpected. I realized sometime in the evening last Saturday that it was Chaos Theory's 10 year Anniversary and decided to quickly throw together a blog post. In fact, I had originally started writing with the intent of telling three little tales about the development of the game, but, as I am sure you are aware, I can be a bit wordy, and it was getting late, so I only shipped one of them.

I guess it just happened that the particular story I chose struck a chord. Obviously, quality of life issues in the game industry remain a big issue, and what happened to me (and many others) continues to happen today. It was decidedly not my intent last week to drop a bomb and then drop the mic. What to me is 'some crazy shit that happened to me a decade ago' is a big deal to a lot of people, it turns out. So perhaps I should speak that.

I think the most important thing that I feel about it, is that the problem of quality of life in the game industry is not a simple problem, and that having a simplistic stance on the issue is not helpful to the people who are suffering.

Many people seemed to be blaming the evil bosses of the evil corporations for the imposition of eighty hour weeks. While this happens, and it is shameful, I assure you, no one has ever imposed an eighty hour week on me, and I have never ordered a crunch on any one of my teams, ever. My eighty hour weeks were something I did to myself. They were not mandated by Ubisoft.

Other people pinned the long weeks to shitty production practices and bad planning. It's true that some of our planning was shoddy, but at the same time, I can say with certainty that even if we had had better practices and planning I would definitely not have gone home after 40 hours a week. I wanted to be there. It was the only thing I wanted.

Many pointed out that the science shows that prolonged crunch demonstrably leads to bad results. Sure - data shows that. But that does not mean there are not exceptions. Certainly there were bad results for me and my health (and for others as well). But there were no bad results for the game. I'm pretty sure that the game was not a 100 metacritic and all our crunching left us with a lousy 94. Those hours and all that stress mattered. To say that it did not, or that it was deleterious to the final game is simply false in this case.

Others seemed to want to rush forward and empathize and say 'hey, that sounds awful, but you should know it was worth it'. While I appreciate the sentiment and the empathy, what you mean by that is that you believe it was worth it because what you gained was valuable. That's great, I am flattered. But you actually don't, and can't know the cost. It's as if I bought a cookie from you for five dollars and ate it, and you are telling me it was worth it because you're happy with your five dollars. But you don't know what the cookie tasted like. The taste of the cookie is my experience. Not yours. So while I appreciate the empathy (I sincerely do), I still feel it's important not to jump to a simplified perspective on a complicated issue that has such potential to damage people. What we really need to do is try to understand these quality of life issues, and empower people to come up with ways that allow them to solve the problems that are specific to their own lives in the contexts in which they are dealing with them.

Probably every quality of life issue is different. Everyone gets sucked into different traps. Long hours can be the thing that causes the problem. They can be the thing that compounds it. They can be the thing that people use to conceal the problem. Believe it or not, they can also be the thing that helps. There is no single problem, and there is no magic bullet.

As I said, in my case on Chaos Theory, I was not being told to work three jobs and put in eighty hours a week. I chose to do it. I did it because in a very real way, doing it made me happy. I felt empowered, fulfilled, and appreciated. I did it because I believed it was possible to make a better game than the original Splinter Cell, and that the easiest path to get there was through a lot of hard work. The positive feedback I was getting in the short term sucked me into a destructive spiral over the long term. I was exhausted and stressed, but the best way to deal with that problem was to get a few important things done on the game and get the high from having moved the game forward.

Back in 2001, just before I left Vancouver to go to Ubisoft and start my career in games a friend of mine gave me a bit of advice. He told me (I'm paraphrasing), "If you want to be successful in a big company, the way to do that is to make yourself irreplaceable." That's what I did almost from the minute my feet hit the ground in Montreal. I just started working like a machine. I stuck my nose in everything and I tried to pick up every loose task I could. By the time the original Splinter Cell had shipped I had gone from being a rookie level designer who had never worked on a game before to being a level designer, game designer and scriptwriter on a 92 Metacritic blockbuster that sold over five million copies (that was a lot in 2002). My level had been the one to represent the game at E3. My other level was the one on the demo disk in Official XBox Magazine. My other level was the first one in the game. I was irreplaceable.

When the core Splinter Team left Ubi to go found EA Montreal, it was obvious that I would take the Lead Level Design job and write the script. Who else would you ask to do that? I became the Creative Director not long after that, and yeah - no question I was irreplaceable again.

You know the rest of the story from the previous post. But here's the part I didn't talk about:

After Chaos Theory, I was pretty seriously burned out. I said at the time that I never wanted to make another Splinter Cell again - because frankly, I'm pretty sure I can't do it better, so what would be the point? So I decided to go and work on Far Cry 2. And at the same time as I made that decision, I also considered that advice my friend had given me about making myself irreplaceable. I realized that while it had technically 'worked', it was totally unsustainable and would not end well. I decided I needed a new strategy, and what seemed a straightfoward alternate strategy at the time was to just 'do the opposite'.

I decided to go into Far Cry 2 with the explicit goal of 'replacing myself'. What that meant, concretely, was finding a better Lead Level Designer than me, and finding a better writer than me so that I would only have one job, and then - perhaps even more important - working to build as many of the creative leaders as I could so that maybe one day, I could have no jobs. Presumably this would lead to me being at the top of some kind of pyramid scheme where I got to sit on a beach and drink mojitos and play videogames for the rest of my life - but I didn't really think it through that far.

Anyway - that's exactly what I set out to do. I brought in a Lead Level Designer who unquestionably was better at it than I was. I evolved the role of 'writing' into the role of Narrative Design, and brought in a Narrative Designer who was better than I was, and then I spent the next three years having them tell me how stupid I was and it was great.

Far Cry 2 was hard as hell. In a lot of ways, it was harder than Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory. There are things that that game changed in me that will never go back to the way they were before. Maybe I'll write about those when Far Cry 2 turns ten. But all that said, for the most part, I worked 40-50 hour weeks for almost the entire development of Far Cry 2. I didn't suffer real damage in the way I did on Chaos Theory. Yes, there were people who worked a lot longer and harder hours that. On several occasions I tried to order people to leave the building, and I remember asking the Producer how we could force people to go home. Some of the reasons those people were working so hard had to do with bad planning and management. Some of it had to do with scope creep. Some of it was because they were super engaged. I'm sure their reasons are as complex as mine were, and I won't try to diminish them through simplificiation. It's complicated. It's hard.

Today, the Lead Level Designer, the Narrative Designer and the Art Director from Far Cry 2 are all Creative Directors on different projects. Far Cry 2, in my opinion, is a better and more important game that Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory. I won't try to take too much credit for that, but I do suspect that if I had continued to position myself as irreplacable, I would not have made it through at all. The project would have crashed and burned, the game would have been taken over by another creative lead and likely rebooteed. Likely many of the people who developed themselves through the course of that production would have been derailed and might not be doing as well professionally as they are today.

So there you have it - those are my thoughts on the complexities of quality of life in the game industry and that's my one and only strategy for not getting snuffed out: replace yourself. It's not a magic bullet, but that's all I've got.

(It just so happens I feel the same approach applies to designer authorship - but that's another topic.)

March 22, 2015

Obviously, a lot has changed in that time, but I'm not going to wax nostalgic about that. I thought instead I would regale you a never before made public tale of what that game meant to me.

Chaos Theory was a hell of a project. I began as the Lead Level Designer and the Scriptwriter, which meant from the start I was doing two serious, full time jobs. I had to get the level design team queued up to deliver 12 maps that were of much higher and much more uniform quality than those in the original game, and I had to make sure we had a story and script that worked all the way through. I also had to get a commitment from that entire team that - come hell or high water - we would not cut a single level. This was doubling down on both the team, and on quality - it meant everyone on the level design side was bought in, but it also meant I could work with confidence on a script that would not later be hobbled by having to move or cut levels.

At the same time, there was a lot of stuff to fix in terms of the global vision of the game. The original Splinter Cell had been a big hit, but it was not without its serious faults. Punishing 'Game Over' gating and brutal trial-and-error gameplay that we should have fixed in the original needed some challenging and innovative solutions if Splinter Cell was to be moved forward.

Development was hard. Sometime around Alpha, mandate came down from Ubi that all internal projects needed to have a Creative Director. Mathieu Ferland - the Producer - asked me to do the job. I said no. I was not convinced that it was not just a bullshit management position and I was worried that I already had two jobs. But after a few discussions with friends and family and the team, a week or so later I changed my mind and became Creative Director, Lead Level Designer and Writer for the game. If you watch the credits, you'll see that three of the first five names in the credits are me. The other two were Mathieu Ferland, and the Art Director, The Chinh Ngo. Anyway, these responsibilities came with a heavy price, though. I spent most of the 24 months of Chaos Theory's development working 80 hours a week.

About six months after I became Creative Director, when the game was around Beta, my good friend Dave (who had been an AI programmer on the original Splinter Cell, and who is currently one of the founders of Tiger Style) came to Montreal to visit. He stayed with us, and he slept in our spare room for a week or ten days. That week I took 'time off' - by which I mean I left work at 6pm or so every night so we could have dinner and hang out. It was fun - I've been told. I don't really remember.

I went to GDC in March of 2005, while the game was in the distribution process, and I gave a talk about the narrative structure of the game. Of course, I also got to hang out with Dave under far less stressful circumstances. Over dinner one night, we got to talking about the time he'd last been in Montreal. During that discussion, I kept correcting him about what we'd done the last time he was in Montreal, but we kept disagreeing about the details and the timing. Over the course of the meal, we realized that I actually had no memory of his trip to Montreal six months previously, and that I was recalling a previous visit he'd made about a year or so before that. Dave had spent a week living in my house. I had curtailed my work week down from 70-80 hours to a normal 40 in order to spend time with him. We had eaten great meals, gone to great bars, seen movies, played games, and talked about our careers and the industry and our pasts and our futures, and all of it was simply fucking gone. I could not remember any of it.

To be clear - I do not mean I didn't remember what we did or what we talked about. I mean that I literally had no memory of the events. To me it was like it never happened. It was like he never visited. There was just an empty space in my brain that had been overwritten by the stress and anxiety of Splinter Cell. Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory gave me brain damage.

Once we realized that the incongruities in our conversation were the result of a legitimate failing of my memory, Dave helped me trying to find a handle. We talked about it over dinner, and then on and off over time. I spoke with my wife about it (she, of course, had full recollection), and eventually, I was able to pin a few minor pieces of my memories to the cork board of my brain and piece together a kind of past.

Over time, I was able to slowly reconstruct some significant part of that lost week. I remember a few meals and a few conversations in a few bars. I remember my friend being in my house. I remember us drinking coffee together and smoking cigarettes.

Writing it all down, now, I have to confess I have mixed feelings about it. I am really, truly proud of what we accomplished with Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory. It stands the test of time as one of the best games ever made. At the same time, the personal cost for making it was real and serious. It's not about forgotten beers in some bar on St Laurent. It's about brain damage and the loss of life. To this day, I am still not sure what the right equation is there. I'm still not sure if it was worth it. I'm still not sure if I would do it again if I had the chance.

March 17, 2015

Having read Ian Bogost’s recent piece in The Atlantic several times now, I think I’ve managed to digest what he’s saying and figure out how I feel about it.

First off, I feel the piece is trying to do too much. Bogost opens by eulogizing Maxis, and celebrating the studio’s impressive contribution to our medium, but hitched to that wagon is a larger statement Bogost is making about the kinds of games we make, the kinds of games we could make, and the kinds of games we ought to make. The eulogy is fine; I don’t have much to say about that. But I feel like the rest of the piece makes a claim (I think unintentionally) about how we might categorize games that I have a really hard time agreeing with.

Bogost laments that we (as players and as developers) have become fixated on characters in games, and suggests that we would do better to design games that allow us to explore and examine systems that are larger than ourselves. The effective unpacking of his title is that there are games that try to be about individuals and games that try to be about larger conceptual structures – social, political, economic and cultural ideas – and that games about these larger structures are better. Better, to Bogost, seems to mean at very least that the medium of games is more suited to present those ideas and thus games about them achieve better outcomes, but even beyond that, he implies these things are somehow qualitatively more valuable as things for us to explore.

Now, I strongly agree we should make games that afford us the opportunities to play with and thereby deeply understand the higher order systems that we exist within. I agree that games are uniquely suited to expose these sorts of large, complex systems which – outside of the context of a game are typically obfuscated, hard to isolate, hard to read, and impossible to examine objectively.

However, I disagree that games about characters preclude the sort of examinability of higher order domains or formal structures or patterns that Bogost wants to see more of. I feel like Bogost is presenting a false dichotomy: that there are simulations that can speak to the higher order constructs of our culture, and that there are stories of the journeys of individuals that cannot, and that we must choose between them. Bogost is saying there is SimCity – which allows us to examine Wright’s Americanized synthesis of a range of sociocultural theories – and then there is The Last of Us which allows us to examine – at best – a few small relationships between a few poorly simulated individuals. Bogost’s lament is that SimCity’s perspective on the forces that shape our culture is elevating, while The Last of Us is at best an inferior novel. Without saying it directly, Bogost is making the claim that there cannot exist a category of game that allows the player to understand and feel and engage with those higher order systems while also undertaking an individual journey through them. I think this is already demonstrably untrue.

Molleindustria’s Unmanned provides fascinating perspectives into the banality of automated war-fighting, the proceduralization of violence, and the impact of ethical siloing on interpersonal relationships, and it does all of these things from the perspective of an individual character on a journey. Unmanned is a comparatively simple game, and it does not allow me to directly touch the sliders that embody the relationships between those higher order concepts – but it does enable me to feel that those sliders exist and are interrelated.

Bogost, I am sure, would argue that a novel or a film would do a better job of both providing me with that simple, authored perspective, and with taking me on that journey. Surely, taken as a whole, Syriana – which deals with all of these themes and more – does a better job of communicating them than Unmanned. I would agree – but not because games about individual journeys cannot also be about higher order constructs – rather, I would agree because Unmanned is just a very small game, and Syriana was a $50M film with an excellent script, a solid director and amazing actors to bring it together.

In terms of its themes, Lucas Pope’s Papers, Please is similar to Unmanned. In Papers, Please, I embody a character, and I go with that character on a personal, transformative journey that I control in large part. The game also gives me perspectives on the higher order structures of our culture: the numbing banality of bureaucracy, the deresponsiblizing power of distributed systems, and their impact on how individuals judge and treat one another. Papers, Please does not let me directly manipulate the sliders that control how oppressive or violent the State of Arstotzka is. It doesn’t allow me to objectively observe how the cost of food and gas affects the behavior of a border guard with insufficient training and ever-increasing pressure to process travelers quickly under ever more byzantine constraints.

Playing Papers, Please, I do not build and test the hypothesis that subsidizing the price of gas would diminish stress on border guards, and thus lead to more ethical outcomes in terms of how people are evaluated at the border, which in turn would reduce violence, increase regional stability and lower gas prices – removing the need for subsidies, giving my state more economic stability, and simultaneously increasing happiness. But at the same time, I feel that Papers, Please helped me understand those things the way Bogost seems to claim a game about characters could not. In fact, it helped me understand those things better than Syriana did.

So again, I think that Bogost has presented a false dichotomy by suggesting there are games about characters and there are games about higher order cultural constructs and that as game developers and as players we need to choose between them when we make a game or when we play a game.

I think that a game like Crusader Kings presents a model of complicated human interpersonal interaction, and a simulation of how the implicated personalities and their relationships drive human culture. In fact, Crusader Kings stands out to me as an exemplar of a category of games that Bogost seems to want to wave out of existence by asserting we have to choose between one of two categories into which Crusader Kings does not fit.

Admittedly, Crusader Kings is significantly closer to SimCity than Papers, Please is, but perhaps from Bogost’s perspective the ‘embodied characters’ are really abstract constructs and to him Crusader Kings is just another SimCity. That might be a fair stance.

But further out from Crusader Kings is Shadow of Mordor, where you clearly and undeniably embody a character, and yet at the same time you interact directly with an interactive simulation of the politics of succession, leadership and authority within Orcish society. Now, I will be the first to admit that the kind of ‘cultural takeaway’ Bogost seems to want players to receive from the games he is talking about is not going to be much informed by a more sophisticated appreciation of the Rites of Succession of the Uruk-hai, but subject matter is irrelevant if what we’re looking for is existence proof. There is no reason this kind of higher-order simulation of sociopolitical brinksmanship, applied violence and the consequences thereof could not be stood-up in a context that is relevant to the world we live in. Swap the Outcasts for some ex-patriate mercenaries, Orcish warlords for African ones, and Mordor for a failed African state, and suddenly you might find a game where good and evil, race and creed, partnerships and politics are significantly less cut-and-dry, and significantly more informative of the kinds of larger cultural forces that shape the lives of millions of people (if you succeeded - which no one yet has).

So yes, I think we already have numerous, though tentative examples of these kinds of games; games that are both about the journey of an individual, but also about the big ideas of the culture (fictional or otherwise) in which that individual exists. I will admit that along a number of axes we have mostly done a fairly poor job of achieving the goals Bogost implies. Bogost wants us to truly understand and feel the consequential interdependency of large scale, richly interconnected, sensitive systems, and it is definitely true that accessing the sliders that move those systems by using the guns or swords of our embodied characters to shoot or stab them up or down a notch is a clumsy interface at best.

But I don’t think we should bury the idea along with Maxis and throw our arms up in the air. I think there is a huge undeveloped space here for us to explore as designers, and a fruitful landscape of discovery here for players. I feel that if we make these sorts of games well, and continue to refine them, we can begin competing and innovating on the axis of ‘how my embodied character influences the sliders’.

I personally hope that we can evolve the play experience over time from one where you play the mercenary/assassin who tips the balance by killing the right people, to one where you play the spy with much finer grained control who murders rarely or not at all. Eventually, perhaps, we can play the diplomat, the senator or the lobbyist constantly challenged to overcome and manage her interactions with other players and characters in a dynamic, empathic exploration of these higher order cultural systems in a way that presents them as complicated - not because they are harder than shooting an AK-47 at a moving target through the jungle, but because humans are just really bad at them.

And maybe then, if these games are good, and we play them a lot, maybe we’ll get better at them, and maybe we’ll be empowered to confront these problems not as a bunch of sliders to be optimized, but as the messy interpersonal problems they are; mired in doubt and fear and weakness and frailty. Those sound like fucking spectacular games to me.

September 13, 2014

I just came across the news (also) that Douglas E Smith, the creator of Lode Runner passed away last week. Lode Runner was a pretty formative game for me and not simply because I played it a lot. It contributed to my design thinking in a really profound way. I wrote about it indirectly for Edge Magazine's 20th Anniversary Issue just over a year ago when I was still doing a monthly column for them. It first appeared online on their website here.

I'm reposting the article here, today, to re-present those thoughts outside of the celebratory context they were originally published under.

Time Invested

Toward the end of 1982, sales of the Commodore VIC-20 were in decline and as Christmas approached outlets like K-Mart were marking down prices on the VIC-20 to clear out shelf space for its next-gen replacement, the Commodore-64.

As the only child of a single, working mom, I had long given up hope of ever receiving an Intellivision or a ColecoVision, so it must have been some magical combination of my relentless begging, K-Mart’s aggressive pricing, and Captain Kirk’s commercial for the ‘home computer of the Eighties’ that allowed my mother to entertain the fantasy that her son might one day work with computers on a starship.

Her fantasy came half true – and so did mine. The VIC-20 could play games on cartridge, just like a console, but the selection was terrible and the cartridges were $80; half the price she’d paid for the machine itself. I only ever received one.

Fortunately, the one I got was Lode Runner, which is an excellent game. Even better, it included a level editor that allowed me to design my own levels and save them to cassette. Once I had exhausted the levels that shipped with the game, I began making my own content. When I tired of that, I taught myself to code in BASIC and made my own games. My first complete game was a text adventure where you were a thief who needed to get to a safe and loot it before the person in the house caught you.

Sadly, by ’84 or ’85 I had all but drained the VIC-20 of its fun. Making more text adventures to play by myself offered diminishing returns and after three years of Lode Runner, the game had become stale. My mother could not afford to buy me another computer and eventually I stopped using my VIC-20.

My last hurrah as a gamer was spending most of ’85 - ‘86 school year playing Ultima IV with a friend on his Apple II. We played nearly every day after school and finished the game perhaps three times, but after that, I don’t think I played another game for about seven years.

Twenty years ago, in 1993, I emerged from my own personal gaming Dark Age. The game everyone was playing was Doom, and while I still did not have a PC to play it on, I had several friends who did. A good many of my nights were spent hanging out at friends’ houses playing Doom while everyone else watched Aliens on VHS and got hammered. And it didn’t stop with Doom; Syndicate also came out that year, and the following year X-Com and TIE Fighter both landed. The year after that was Dark Forces and Command and Conquer. And as the decade wore on, things just got better. Duke Nukem 3D and Quake both launched in ’96, and 1997 was Jedi Knight. And then, sometime in late 1997 or early 1998, I played the demo of Thief on a friend’s PC. That was when I knew I had to have my own machine.

In 1998, both Thief and the original Rainbow 6 turned first-person shooters on their head by challenging the notion that ‘shooting’ was the important part of the genre. I played both on my own Pentium II, 300 MHz machine with 64M of RAM, running under Windows ’97. It was on this machine that I played Alpha Centauri, System Shock 2, Unreal and Unreal Tournament. By the time Deus Ex shipped in 2000, my pitiful P2 couldn’t keep up – and neither could my wallet.

And then something magical happened. I started leveraging the skills I had learned years before on the VIC-20. Not the BASIC coding skills or the Lode Runner specific level design skills – but rather the tenacity and determination to squeeze more fun out of the machine. I started building levels for Unreal Tournament, and then levels for mods. I found copies of older games – games that built a bridge back across my Dark Ages toward my childhood. I played Dune 2, Command and Conquer, Ultima V. I played Wolfenstein 3d and made levels for that too.

I used the times when I was not able to consume games as entertainment to reflect upon how and why I value games in the ways that I do. Before sitting down to write this column and reflect upon the last twenty years of gaming, I had assumed that the seeds of my appreciation for player expression and creative play were planted by a few key titles in the mid ‘90s. But now I see that, for me at least, the verbs ‘to play’, ‘to create’ and ‘to learn’ all represent effectively the same concept and that fusing these concepts is something I hope my games might do for others.

It seems to me, now, that these past twenty years of playing games, learning how they mean, and how to make them, and then creating them for others is an obvious – even predictable consequence of those three years I spent with my VIC-20. In some sense, the person I am today represents the delivery of some vague and indirect promise that Captain Kirk made to my mother. He suggested that a game machine is a delivery vehicle for content and that it ultimately supports the broadcast culture paradigm that separates creators from consumers. A computer, by contrast, can be used to create. And as a consequence, even in technological obsolescence its potential value approaches infinity. A game machine will always depreciate in value, while a computer is an investment in the future.

August 27, 2013

There’s been a lot of water under the bridge in the eight and a half years since Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory shipped back in 2005. We’ve seen the sunset of an entire console generation, and we are about to sunset another. Three major titles have shipped in the series, the most recent of which effectively giving rise to an entirely new development studio. Still, every now and then I get an email or a mention on twitter from an old fan or a new player thanking me for the game. Normally I just pass the thanks along to the team, who ultimately deserve the credit, but this time I felt I’d say a little more.

A few days ago, the team over at Cane And Rinse ran a podcast that served as a kind of retrospective on the first three Splinter Cell games, with a particular focus on the role of Chaos Theory in the ‘trilogy’. I gave it a listen and it brought back a lot of good memories. For the most part, James, Darren and Karl all have a deep and nuanced appreciation for the game, so the podcast itself is somewhat biased – though they do level their fair share of valid criticism toward the many areas where we stumbled (or outright failed… remember the UAVs in Seoul?).

To even them out further there is a short (pre-recorded) segment toward the end where James Batchelor of GameBurst levels some fair criticism at the game from the (probably more common) perspective of a player who came to the series (mostly) for the first time with Conviction.

Anyway, if you’re a Splinter Cell fan, or a Chaos Theory fan, or if you’re curious about why this game in particular is so often called out as the benchmark for the franchise, I think this podcast does a pretty good job of illuminating where that perspective comes from. My interpretation of the main point they make in this regard is that the game is respectful of the player.

They seem to be saying that they felt the game gave them the freedom and the capability to decide how they wanted to play without forcing them to jump through arbitrary hoops, and without hand-holding them through every little challenge. To this end, they extensively praise the level design – talking at length about what makes missions such as the Lighthouse and the Bank so strong, and exploring also, to some extent, the mixed success we had with some other levels – such parts of Seoul or the Bathhouse. They specifically praise the high density of meaningful interaction and the richness and broad applicability of the player tools – which in my mind (and with the benefit of hindsight) – are the main factors that made the game both highly appealing to a very specific set of players, and somewhat intimidating and inaccessible for a much broader audience. In this sense, I feel that Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory was very much a game of its era.

The main thing I would disagree with in the podcast is a comment James makes at about the 35 minute mark where he says “Clint Hocking is the man you point to if you like or dislike Chaos Theory.” Once again, please point your accusatory fingers at me for the UAVs, for that last almost unbeatable room in the Bath House, for those inexplicably-missed point-blank headshots, for the lack of the SWAT turn, (and on and on and on) – but you’ll need to grow about a hundred and fifty more fingers if you want to point at all the people who deserve the credit.

Congratulations again to the entire Chaos Theory team for delivering a game still worthy of consideration almost a decade later, and thanks to James, Darren and Karl for bringing back the memories.

May 18, 2013

Last week I was able to attend UCSC's Inventing the Future of games Symposium in Mountainview. Overall, I foudn the conference to be super interesting as it brought together a diverse range people who are working on the problems of dynamic narratives using a wide range of approaches.

I gave a short presentation (slides and text are here) along with Microsoft's Richard Rouse (and a former colleague from Ubi Montreal) as well as Telltale Games Kevin Bruner. We represented the 'people working on interactive narratives in the Capital "I" Games Industry.

Another set of talks and a panel included Emily Short (Versu), Stephane Bura (Storybricks) and Asa Kalama (Disney) each presenting very different perspectives on interactive storytelling from the ones we had discussed on our panel.

A third set of talks featured Matt MacLaurin (eBay), Susan Bonds (42 Entertainment), and Tawny Schlieski (Intel) talking about transmedia and how narrative and different media can overlap with our real world in interesting ways.

The whole day was opened by Warren Spector and closed by Brenda Romero - so all told, the speaker line-up was incredibly impressive.

I was contacted the other day by someone in France who keeps a blog on the GameKult site to inform me that he had come across my post on Bioshock and it had helped articulate for him some of the problems he had had with the game.

He decided to translate the post to french in order to share it with the francophone gaming community. My french is not good enough for me to have done the translation work myself, so I'm very thankful. I've read the post, and while he omits some of the opening and closing (which were, in any case, more personal, and not related much to the thesis of the peice), he seems to capture the rest very accurately. I am linking it here for my readers who may be more comfortable reading it in french. A link has also been added to the original article.

February 16, 2013

Last night was the opening night of the Art of Games exhibit at the EMP Museum, and along with several other great speakers from local the local industry, Valve co-worker Dave Kircher and I were there to give short talks about programming and design respectively.

My talk, titled The Art of Games, Why Are We Here, is about games and their relationship to more traditional art, and how games acheive their meaning. The slides (which include in the notes more or less exactly what I said) are here, as well as over on the right.

If you find the discussion interesting and would like a more robust (full hour) talk on the same subject, you can get the slides and notes for the entire GDC 2011 talk here (also linked on the right) or check out the full video of the talk on the GDC Vault, where it is now available for free.

I was never completely happy with the conclusion of the GDC talk, and the version of the slides linked here includes what I feel is a much stronger and clearer conclusion that better encapsulates the thesis and nails the point I was trying to make a little more strongly.

February 14, 2013

To celebrate the opening of the exhibit, the EMP is hosting the Game Night event which will feature lots of gaming, as well as talks from seven different game developers talking about different a range of different topics. Game Night opens at 6pm for EMP Members and &pm for the public. The talks start at 7:30.

My Valve co-worker Dave Kircher and I will be sharing the last speaking slot of the evening, starting at 9:45. My talk is called "The Art of Games: Why Are We Here".

I'll post slides after the talk is done, but I hope to see some local Seattle devs and gamers there for the live version.

August 07, 2012

I totally don’t have the time or the emotional energy to be writing this post, but in fact, I kind of feel like I don’t have the time to not write this post. You see, someone who I don’t know seems to have un-Friended me on Facebook.

I first accepted a Friend Request from this person – whom I will henceforth call 'Gina' – sometime before GDC. I remember noticing her updates around that time because we had a friend staying at our place during GDC and I remember lamenting that this new Facebook Friend was causing me some consternation.

I am Canadian. As such, I tend to have fairly left-leaning political opinions and moral convictions. To boot, I am probably more left-leaning in the ideological sense than the ‘average’ Canadian. That said, when I agreed to come to America as a guest of this nation, I decided that I would put a lid on my politics, and do my best to observe and understand how Americans think and feel about their nation and about the issues they struggle with, while trying not to pass judgement. I suspect that I fail to keep my opinions in check more often than I succeed, but I do try.

Judging from her updates over the course of six months or more, my former Facebook Friend Gina has fairly right-leaning political opinions and moral convictions. Her stances on a variety of hot-button political issues in America today are virtually the opposite of mine. She questions the legitimacy of Obama’s birth certificate. She opposes gay marriage. She opposes more stringent gun control laws. She is against health care reform. She supports the Tea Party. When I told my friend during GDC about Gina, his response was simply that I should un-Friend her.

But I didn’t (and don’t) see the point in that. I don’t see the point in that for two reasons.

The first reason is Facebook itself. The beating heart of Facebook is the idea that you can connect with people who you otherwise would never know – never mind share ideas with – by way of something else you have in common. Whether Gina knows a friend of mine, or has played one of the games I have worked on, or went to a school I went to, the point is that whatever tiny thing connects us has the potential to be the thing that bridges the gap between us and allows us to reconcile our differences. Now, I am a pretty cynical guy, and while I see that Facebook has the potential to be that, I also see the reality that it is mostly just a platform for marketing and self-promotion and for reinforcing already-held ideas. In the end, though, that’s the point. If we give up on what Facebook can be by un-Friending all the people whose opinions we disagree with, then we submit to a more cynical Facebook that nobody wants or needs.

The second reason is America. If there is any country in the history of the world where thinking differently is not just accepted, but is embraced, celebrated, and rewarded, it is the United States of America. I didn’t come to this country because I wanted to be around a bunch of people who looked the same, acted the same, sounded the same, dressed the same as me and/or thought the same as me. I came here to be challenged. Now, being challenged does not mean rolling over and accepting things you oppose – and I remain opposed to most of Gina’s positions – but it does mean coming to understand how and why you hold the ideas you hold, and why and how others hold differing ideas. This understanding strengthens your ideas and prepares you to challenge their ideas when the opportunity arises. But that opportunity will only arise if you continue to listen and refuse to walk away from the table. You should never turn your back on someone with a bad idea. If you don’t convince them it’s a bad idea when you have the chance, they’ll convince others that it’s a good idea and when you next confront it, it will be a bad idea with momentum....

So why am I sad?

Well, the end of this story unfortunately starts with the recent shooting at the theatre in Colorado. I didn’t read too much about it, frankly. I already read that story when I was in high-school, and again in college, and again in university, and again, and again. I have my opinions about how to better deal with the problem of murderous rampages, but those are not ideas I want to discuss on Facebook. I am fortunate to have a career where I can share ideas about the shape of the world, both as I see it, and as how I feel it ought to be. When it comes to complex issues of human nature I would prefer to spend the three or four years of effort it takes to develop a well-reasoned position on one idea than to scream hundreds of ideas at the walls of Facebook – which after all is just that – screaming at walls.

After the Colorado shooting, Gina put a lot of updates on Facebook of the fairly predictable sort; pro 2nd Amendment, anti-gun control rhetoric of the ‘from my cold dead hands’ sort. All of that is fine. I disagree with the idea, but it’s irrelevant because firstly I support her right to express those ideas (under the Amendment that comes before the one that enables them) and secondly because I am a Canadian, and I have no say in the matter anyway.

What did trouble me a bit was her blanket assertion that the guns used in the shooting must not have been legally owned by the shooter. When I later read the guns were all legally acquired, I was tempted to post on her wall to ask what she thought about that fact. But I didn’t. Maybe I should have. Maybe that was the moment when Facebook could have been good for something and allowed two people with differing ideas to connect. Opportunity missed.

But then, this afternoon, I read (sadly) about another mass shooting by a person with a legally owned firearm. I remembered Gina’s update (it wasn’t long ago), and wondered if in the ensuing weeks people had pointed out her mistake, and if a discussion had arisen there and if I might have been given a second chance to see if I could reconcile my ideas with hers.

I typed (her real name) into Facebook’s friend search, and turned up nothing.

In the preceding 24-36 hours, she had inexplicably un-Friended me. I know because I remember seeing an update from my timeline at mid-day on Saturday. I wondered if she was just cleaning out her Friends list, and so I scrolled back through the last day or so of updates to see if I could find a clue.

And then it dawned on me that very probably she had un-Friended me because I had said something she didn’t agree with. I had shown her that I was not the same as her, and (probably) she wanted a wall that reinforced what she already believed, not a wall that challenged her ideas.

Now, probably, since most of my own friends, and most of the people who come to my blog, are self-selecting and will be inclined to agree with me, I suspect most of you will say ‘good riddance’. You probably think it’s a good thing that she has cut herself off and further isolated herself. If that’s what you think, I direct you to the title of this post. It’s not titled ‘fuck you, Gina’, it’s titled ‘I’m sad’.

I’m sad because the fact is that my and Gina’s differences – relative to the scope and scale of human disagreements in general – are effectively non-existent. Gina and I live in the most enlightening society in human history, and we have access to the most powerful connective technology in the history of the world, and we still managed to outmaneuver each other. I’m sad because, in some sense at least, I invested a lot of time and energy into this pseudo-relationship with this person I never met. I persisted in not un-Friending Gina based on principles that I actually care about, even though at times it diminished my own happiness to do it. I tried – for months – to make this technology work for these people in this culture, and at the end of the day it seems to have not mattered at all.

I’m sad because sometimes it seems like it doesn’t improve my life, or the lives of those around me to even think about these things, never mind talk about them. And that sucks.